Spiritual assessment in aging: a framework for clinicians

Older adults may benefit from clinical conversations about the role of spirituality in their lives, but social workers and other helping professionals often do not have an understanding of where to proceed beyond initial questions of whether spirituality and/or religion are important and if so, what religious preference is held. Much has been written about definitions of spirituality and religion, but the literature has not yet provided a clear focus on ways to assess whether these are integrated positively or negatively in the lives of older adults. This article identifies eleven domains in spirituality that might be assessed. Within each domain an explanation is provided as well as a brief discussion of the rationale for including it in the classification. Sample interview questions and an illustrative vignette are included. Together these eleven domains build an important framework and resource for spiritual assessment with older adults.     

Gendered policies and practices that increase older men's risk of elder mistreatment

We aim to detail some of the ways that social policy and gendered practices put older men at risk of elder mistreatment. Research on the abuse and neglect that older adults experience has often focused on the characteristics of the victims and the dynamics within families, emphasizing factors such as the likelihood of an intergenerational cycle of violence, substance abuse and dependency, and older men's financial status as key risks in elder abuse. The effect on men from this type of analysis is that elder mistreatment remains an individual or family problem rather than being viewed as a larger societal concern. This article challenges the individualistic focus by outlining the importance of societal forces affecting older men's risk of mistreatment.     

Population Redistribution And Changes In The Size Density Slope

As regional population density increases territorial units tend to subdivide. For maximum societal time-efficiency the slope relating the logarithms of unit areas to those of unit densities should be -2/3. When boundaries become fixed, however, observed slopes tend to drift toward a value of zero. It was earlier hypothesized that such slope-erosion was due to increasing concentration of the population. Historical data for the primary political divisions of ten nations shows general support for the hypothesis.     

Social indicators in policy planning: Applying the public marketing model in Yuba city,California

This article is a follow up to a paper appearing in the Spring Issue (4) 1977 of this Journal by the same authors entitled ‘Public Marketing: A Suggested Policy Paradigm for Community Development in the City’. In the earlier article a public marketing model was advanced as a device to order socioeconomic needs for planning and policy making in city government. This article provides an empirical application of the model in an actual city. The results indicate that the model is a workable and useful tool for social indicator construction and policy formulation.     

A critique of the ZPG urban stress test: On the uses and misuses of social indicators

This is an expanded version of a paper originally prepared for presentation at the annual meetings of the North Central Sociological Association: Louisville, KY; March 22–24, 1990.     

The Moderating Effects of National Age Stereotyping on the Relationships between Job Satisfaction and its Determinants: A Study of Older Workers across 26 Countries

This research explores how national age stereotypes impact older workers' job‐related perceptions by examining probability based samples across 26 countries taken from the European Social Survey. Multilevel data analysis was undertaken. Results show that, at the individual level, both extrinsic rewards and intrinsic rewards directly impact older workers' job satisfaction. At the country level, significant variations are found in the relationships between job satisfaction and related rewards for older workers across the 26 countries. Society's stereotypical views towards older people explained some of these cross‐country variations. This study contributes to extant literature by explicating the process by which society's age stereotypes and the meta‐stereotypes held by older workers affect how these workers make sense and take meaning out of their job‐related circumstances leading to enhanced or diminished job satisfaction. Implications highlight the need for management to be vigilant in identifying and dealing with age stereotypes in the workplace. Furthermore, managers need to be more aware of the potential harmful consequences arising from negative meta‐stereotypes and should implement strategies to tackle workplace stereotypes that would lead to negative meta‐stereotypes held by older workers.